At a time of uncertainty, do Americans want a more aggressive commander in chief?

President Obama is turning out to be a successful war president who can't find his voice on the most pressing issue of his time, which happens to be domestic.

Democrats took a lot of flack for inventing the euphemism "economic security" in the 1990s, partly as a way to describe President Clinton's complicated but generally effective strategy to rebalance risk in the economy. Back then, Americans felt more or less secure about their economic position. But since Obama became president, persistent economic insecurity has defined the political environment.

In a complicated, inter-connected global economy, the president has almost no unilateral authority to fix things. There's no such thing as a presidential jobs agenda -- trade agreements, payroll tax cuts, and regulation reviews are marginal adjustments to the status quo.

In extraordinary times, presidents can sign their names to bills that do extraordinary things, like the $778 billion economic stimulus package that passed during the first month of Obama's presidency. But that measure was negotiated with another branch of government, with whom Obama shares power. That was, for all intents and purposes, his jobs plan: demand-side stimulus of the economy.

The president credibly argues that the intervention helped save the economy, but even the White House understands that the stimulus did nothing to alleviate economic insecurity or pessimism. (This was what health care reform was supposed to accomplish: a down payment to ending insecurity about health expenses. But the messiness of the debate completely squandered any chance of Americans feeling better about their health care system until the reforms actually kick in in force, which isn't until 2014 at the earliest.)

Americans see that Obama controlled Congress for two years and wasn't able to, or didn't choose to, solve the jobs problem. They understand that things would be worse, but they don't understand why things aren't getting better. They hear him promise, as regularly as the seasons turn, that the economy is turning a corner, that businesses are regaining confidence, and that jobs are coming back.

None of this comports with the reality that most Americans see.

And so Americans remain frustrated and Obama's approval rating remains at 48 pecent. The irony is that, so far as international crises go, Obama has been a successful manager. He has been a war president who has prosecuted a campaign against American enemies with precision and subtlety. He has repaired relationships with American allies. A neophyte Democrat, a young guy elected with virtually no foreign policy experience has restored to the Democratic Party a sense that it can act credibly in world affairs and in defense policy. That's an enviable achievement that the president gets no credit for. He did it with humility.

That's the key to his success. He figured out that the last thing the world wanted was another take-charge, head-cracking American president. Instead, he would assume a posture that respected what other countries said they aspired to do -- and then hold them accountable for doing so, using all the means available to him as president: diplomacy, American soft power, intelligence operations, relationships with other countries, and more.

He brings the same rhetorical approach to governing domestically. He doesn't shout or yell or thump his chest. He prefers to "lead from behind," setting out broad expectations and trying to create incentives for other political actors to fulfill them. He prefers long-term, lasting solutions to temporary ones.

He could have signed an executive order ending the ban on gays in the military, but he chose instead to embark on a process that would lead to the irrevocable end of the policy. It hurt him politically, but it means a Republican president won't be able to reverse it.

After a walloping at the ballot box last November, he set the terms for a lame-duck session and pulled about six rabbits out of a tiny hat. His approval ratings rose: Americans saw a guy who forced Congress to work together to achieve an end.

The idea that he's not leading frustrates the president. He noted, with sarcasm, that he met with Republicans and Democrats in both chambers of Congress on the debt ceiling, the leaders of both parties numerous times, put Vice President Joe Biden in charge of a process that made headway (agreeing to more than $1.3 trillion in cuts over 12 years) and ... it's suddenly up to him to show more leadership? How?

Well, for one thing, he could adopt an uncomfortable posture and act like more of a take-charge president. He could, in other words, become Chris Christie, a man roughly the same age with roughly the same contempt for baby boomers and their interest groups, but a man with a totally different style of governing. The New Jersey governor is not terribly popular in-state for it, but his model of holding constant town halls, of being in the room, and of showing the heads cracking has a certain street appeal at a time when hopelessness is the prevailing emotion.

Obama's constant refrain -- it's time for others to get serious -- sounds like an acknowledgement that he isn't in control. It sounds like he is wishing for a solution, rather than creating one. Obama actually tried this Chris Christie bit as Republicans threatened to shut down the government. Toward the end of the process, he summoned congressional leaders to the White House until they came to an agreement on a 2011 budget that House Republicans could (just barely) accept. But Christie doesn't present himself as an honest broker. He has his bottom lines out there and negotiates up from them. Obama kept the lights on in April, just barely, but he seemed to be part of the process -- intervening (to the eyes of Americans) way too late.

The truth is that the White House was involved in those discussions well before Obama was. But Obama specifically chose not to play the role of a prime minister. He reasons that he governs more effectively when he presides, rather than when he gets his hands dirty. Obama's mien exacerbates the perception that he lets events lead him, rather than the other way around.

People want to have confidence in Obama as president. They don't want to hear him complain about congressional inaction. They know that Congress and Washington are broken. They want the president to figure out a way around the obstacles.

It is indeed adult of the president to remind Americans that there are no silver bullets and that there's not much that can be done in the short term. But it makes things sound more hopeless than they are and makes people less confident in his ability to lead them.

Maybe this is the lot that Obama drew -- the way that his personal orientation matches up with the demands of the time. It has proven fairly effective in some domains of governing, but it has not, to date, helped him much on the economy, and it remains to be seen whether, over the long term, Americans come to accept it.

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Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

A controversial treatment shows promise, especially for victims of trauma.

It’s straight out of a cartoon about hypnosis: A black-cloaked charlatan swings a pendulum in front of a patient, who dutifully watches and ping-pongs his eyes in turn. (This might be chased with the intonation, “You are getting sleeeeeepy...”)

Unlike most stereotypical images of mind alteration—“Psychiatric help, 5 cents” anyone?—this one is real. An obscure type of therapy known as EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is gaining ground as a potential treatment for people who have experienced severe forms of trauma.

Here’s the idea: The person is told to focus on the troubling image or negative thought while simultaneously moving his or her eyes back and forth. To prompt this, the therapist might move his fingers from side to side, or he might use a tapping or waving of a wand. The patient is told to let her mind go blank and notice whatever sensations might come to mind. These steps are repeated throughout the session.